Using Guitar Rig 5 in MainStage
Hello all!
I'm just getting started with MainStage, and so far quite liking the possibilities.
However, I've hit one thing which seems to be an issue for me, assuming I've understood it correctly. Each patch seems to have it's own channel strips, with it's own AU instruments etc... which to me seems a bad idea. Surely in this state, I will end up having hundreds of AUs running for the same software, which would slow things down?
On top of that, I'm running keyboard, guitar and vocal through Mainstage. All for me, as I switch what I'm doing depending on the song we're performing (and sometimes mid-song). However, this means I may sometimes want to change a guitar patch while keeping my keyboard the same, or vice versa.
So, to my question; is there a way to change AU presets without changing MainStage patch? I mainly need to do this with Guitar Rig 5 from NI, but I'd also quite like to do it with Massive and Reaktor too.
Not quite sure I've worded that very well, so an example:
I have a MainStage layout set up, which has my vocal going through clean with maybe some EQ etc. I've also got a guitar running through Guitar Rig 5, and my keyboard into Massive. During a song, I start off on keys playing Fat Bass 1 on my keys in Massive for the intro, switch to a distortion for the verse with my guitar, then Fat Bass 2 for the chorus in Massive. Maybe later I'll want a clean guitar in a bridge or something too, with some string hits thrown in from Massive again.
The way MainStage is set out currently, I'd need a patch for each combination, which would leave me with at least 3 "patches" for one song and three instances each of Massive and GR running. I'd much prefer to just send in a control message to change the presets in Massive and Guitar Rig.
Running on a 2014 15" MacBook Pro, 2.2GHz i7/16GB RAM/256GB SSD.
Thanks 🙂
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)